Manga is the Rock 'n' Roll of Gen Z
Discover more from Matt Alt's Pure Invention
Manga is the Rock 'n' Roll of Gen Z
And the biggest hits come from Shonen Jump, which turns 55 this month
Some housekeeping: an announcement for subscribers! I’ve released the first “audiobook” version of one of my essays. You can hear the dulcet tones of my voice reading Did Mario teach Zuckerberg everything he knows? (which suddenly, inexplicably just popped into my head in a Gilbert Gottfried voice, though I promise I’m just reading normally. Or as normally as I can.) Recording and editing these things is actually a lot of work, so the feature is limited to paying subscribers for now.
Let’s jump, ha ha, to the main topic. This month marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of the launch of Weekly Shonen Jump, the manga magazine that first hit newsstands in Japan around this time in 1968. If you know any single magazine title in Japan, it should be this one, for it is Japan’s single most popular periodical. Note I didn’t qualify that with the word “manga.” It’s the top selling magazine of any kind in Japan – to the tune of 1.3 million copies a week. For comparison, that’s on par with the weekly circulation of the New York Times in the States.
And that’s just the print edition! The anime spin-offs and merchandising are incredibly lucrative as well. The manga “Yu-Gi-Oh,” for instance, spawned a card game that has grossed close to ten billion dollars all on its own. And now “One Piece,” another Weekly Shonen Jump creation, is about to make the leap into prestige television. The Netflix adaptation arrives on August 31st, with a budget per episode budget that exceeds even “Game of Thrones” or “The Mandalorian.”
These big numbers are a testament to how far Jump’s influence extends beyond Japan’s borders. In fact six out of the ten best-selling manga/anime franchises of all time originated in the Jump offices, and given how popular manga and anime are around the planet today, you can legitimately argue that Jump has rewired the global imagination. Manga are more than comic books: they’re an identity for fans, an illustrated youth-culture that has defined successive generations of consumers, from the late Sixties all the way up to the current moment.
How did a magazine out of Tokyo, ostensibly crafted for the sensibilities of locals, manage to hit everywhere from Topeka to Timbuktu, staying relevant from Boomer to Zoomer? Allow me to quote from my New Yorker piece last year, “Demon Slayer: The Viral Blockbuster from Japan.”
Launched in 1968, Jump is one of Japan’s oldest and most successful manga weeklies; at its peak, in the nineties, it sold more than six million copies every week. Key to the publication’s enduring popularity is a calculated approach to cultivating talent, honed over the decades by an editorial department that carefully directs the output of freelance comic creators. Every issue of Jump contains a postcard asking readers to rank their favorite titles; this data is then used to shape the direction of story lines in real time. The Jump formula has produced some of Japan’s most enduring pop-cultural hits, including “Dragon Ball,” “Naruto,” “One Piece,” and “My Hero Academia.” It could be argued that, by teasing out episodes of manga via the “algorithm” of reader feedback, and then compiling the most popular series into separately sold stand-alone volumes that could be “binged” all at once, Jump presaged the way the world consumes streaming entertainment today.
This makes it all the more interesting to see Netflix on the cover of the latest issue. Really, it’s a match made in heaven. The most successful Jump series become anime series, which often remain on the air for decades. There are eight hundred half-hour episodes of “Dragon Ball.” “One Piece” has well over a thousand. And those are just the big series. This firehose of content is absolute ambrosia to streaming services like Netflix. It’s why Sony paid a cool billion USD to acquire the anime streaming site Crunchyroll in 2021. And Jump series are the jewels of the anime world, at least from a business perspective.
The “Jump system” is good for the bottom line, but whether it’s good for art is another question. When you look at Jump’s titles, particularly the big hitters, you’ll notice a lot of it feels like well-trodden ground. Outsiders who get bullied, but then just happen to discover they’re in possession of inner gifts. They cultivate these through interactions with friends and foes and foes that become friends and vice versa. Soon they awaken as super-people of one flavor or another, whether in the martial arts, sorcery, or simply manifesting a chainsaw for a head. It’s great stuff, but the broad strokes feel less like artistic expression than filling in the blanks: manga Mad Libs.
Perhaps this is why, even when I was still a heavy consumer of manga, Jump titles never figured heavily in my rotation. I preferred the edgier, more politicized output of rival Young Magazine titles, such as “Akira.” But perhaps it’s unfair to critique Jump on this front. It isn’t designed as fine art, but rather a product that appeals to a very specific adolescent demographic. A lot of pop songs follow similar patterns, after all. And Jump is pure, incandescent, bubblegum pop, as mainstream as it gets in the manga world.
Evergreen formula or no, change is afoot. Jump was slow to jump on the digital bandwagon and distribute its content online. In recent years, Korean “webtoons,” designed by and for digital natives, have been making slow but steady inroads among young digital-native readers. And perhaps more concerning, there have been indications that Jump’s higher-ups are interested in automating the process of producing content for the magazine. In May, a pair of Jump editors announced the creation of an AI tool to ease the “tedious parts of manga creation” (!) Paging Hayao Miyazaki, who famously remarked on AI:
But for now, Shonen Jump represents a living, breathing cornerstone of the Japanese pop-cultural machine. For fans abroad, there’s an app, of course. But to me, nothing beats picking up one of the thick, squarebound paper versions of Jump off the stands in Japan. I’m not even a particular fan of the content! I just love that stuff like this still exists in the digital era, pulpy weeklies that you simply don’t see in the US.
Jump can be found at any bookstore in Japan, alongside many other manga publications of varying levels of quality and success (though, like convenience stores, bookshops curate that shelf-space ruthlessly, so you won’t find any underground or niche content there; it’s all thoroughly mainstream.)
Aside: even if you can’t read Japanese, I really recommend popping into a bookstore or two when you visit Japan. Sterile big-box booksellers have not overtaken the marketplace here as they have in the US, and you can still find plenty of shops ranging from the humdrum to the downright scary.)
Things have changed a lot over the last half-century, but this manga mag – one might say THE manga mag – is still with us. And it’s a reminder that the use of algorithms, formulas, and gatekeepers to shape our tastes is nothing new. We demand novelty but shy away from the unknown. It’s perhaps the essential conundrum of the human animal, at least as a consumer of entertainment and experiences, and it’s precisely why we crave our content to be curated for us. As its fifty-five year track record has shown, Jump is a curator par excellence.